Congratulations to Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal on the publication of their edited book, The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, available through Springer.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Philosophy Department, Otago University is hosting a one day workshop on "Composition, constitution, and mereology" to take place on Saturday, 5 June 2010. Invited speakers include former SCFS visiting fellow Patrick Greenough and SCFS researcher Kristie Miller. Abstracts can be sent to josh.parson@otago.ac.nz by 16 April.

Abstract: The credence you assign to a proposition is an important part of your epistemic attitude toward that proposition. But it's not the whole story. Another important factor is the stability of your credence: roughly the extent to which you expect it to change as you acquire new evidence. Expert probability functions -- be they the credences of your trusted weather forecaster, the credences of your future self or the objective chances -- serve to guide your credences to particular values. But they also serve to stabilize your credences, relative to particular types of evidence. By exploring this feature, I think we can better understand the relationship between credence and expert opinion, including the relationship between credence and objective chance.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Unlike descriptive sciences that are principally concerned with discovering, describing, and explaining phenomena, environmental sciences pursue more immediate goals, such as providing scientific bases for the preservation of biodiversity and natural resources. What distinguishes sciences of this kind from descriptive science is their emphasis on achieving non-epistemic objectives humans consider valuable. They can be labeled ‘teleological’ for this reason. Recent analyses have suggested teleological sciences are value-laden in a strong sense: attempts to demarcate the function of facts and values within them are misguided and obscure rather than illuminate their structure. In fact, the claim that values inextricably permeate teleological sciences has recently been taken to challenge the view that a “gap” exists between facts and values, the gap widely believed to explain why, for example, determining what agents should do is distinct from studying what they actually do and why they do it. These claims are overstated. Teleological sciences are better conceptualized as having a conditional form where stipulated goals reflecting ethical values set much of their general structure and methodologies, but in which this influence can be demarcated from the factual status of claims made within them. The conditional nature of teleological sciences makes this demarcation possible, and helps clarify the function of values in science in general.

About Foundations of Science

With the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, the University of Sydney is a major locus of research into the nature and history of science. This blog is a simple way for the Sydney research community to keep in touch with each other.